VR STILL A NOVELTY, BUT GOOGLE LIGHT-FIELD TECHNOLOGY COULD MAKE IT SERIOUS ART
To make the device, Debevec and his team modified an existing rig, made up of a circle of 16 connected GoPro cameras, that Google introduced for professional VR content creators in 2015. But instead of building a spherical camera as some others (Facebook among them) have done, they connected the cameras in a vertical arc and placed the whole thing on a tripod with a motor and a battery. This let the contraption spin slowly in a circle and capture a sphere’s worth of images.
Read moreKAGGLE TENSORFLOW SPEECH RECOGNITION CHALLENGE
From November 2017 to January 2018 the Google Brain team hosted a speech recognition challenge on Kaggle. The goal of this challenge was to write a program that can correctly identify one of 10 words being spoken in a one-second long audio file. Having just made up my mind to start seriously studying data science with the goal of turning a new corner in my career, I decided to tackle this as my first serious kaggle challenge.
Read moreTEN MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS YOU SHOULD KNOW TO BECOME A DATA SCIENTIST
Machine Learning Practitioners have different personalities. While some of them are “I am an expert in X and X can train on any type of data”, where X = some algorithm, some others are “Right tool for the right job people”. A lot of them also subscribe to “Jack of all trades. Master of one” strategy, where they have one area of deep expertise and know slightly about different fields of Machine Learning. That said, no one can deny the fact that as practicing Data Scientists, we will have to know basics of some common machine learning algorithms, which would help us engage with a new-domain problem we come across. This is a whirlwind tour of common machine learning algorithms and quick resources about them which can help you get started on them.
Read moreUNHAPPINESS IS A PALATE-CLEANSER
Happiness, in one form or another, seems to be a common goal that most of us would like to attain. We often behave as though we might find a route to contentment—comfort, satiety, warmth, or some other reward—and be happy all the time if we could just make the right choices. But pleasure is often fleeting, even from the most appealing experiences, giving rise to ennui and sparking the drive for something new and sensational.
Read moreTOP BOTTLED WATER BRANDS ARE CONTAMINATED WITH PLASTIC PARTICLES, STUDY FINDS
The world’s leading brands of bottled water are contaminated with tiny plastic particles that are likely seeping in during the packaging process, according to a major study across nine countries published Wednesday. “Widespread contamination” with plastic was found in the study, led by microplastic researcher Sherri Mason of the State University of New York at Fredonia, according to a summary released by Orb Media, a U.S.-based nonprofit media collective. Researchers tested 250 bottles of water in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Lebanon, Mexico, Thailand and the United States.
Read moreUSING AI TO MATCH HUMAN PERFORMANCE IN TRANSLATING NEWS FROM CHINESE TO ENGLISH
A team of Microsoft researchers said Wednesday that they believe they have created the first machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as a person. Source: microsoft.com
BRAINLESS EMBRYOS SUGGEST BIOELECTRICITY GUIDES GROWTH
In recent years, by working on tadpoles and other simple creatures, Levin’s laboratory has amassed evidence that the embryo is molded by bioelectrical signals, particularly ones that emanate from the young brain long before it is even a functional organ. Those results, if replicated in other organisms, may change our understanding of the roles of electrical phenomena and the nervous system in development, and perhaps more widely in biology.
Read moreASTRONAUT’S DNA NO LONGER MATCHES HIS IDENTICAL TWIN’S AFTER YEAR SPENT IN SPACE
Spending a year in space not only changes your outlook, it transforms your genes. Preliminary results from NASA’sTwins Studyreveal that 7% of astronaut Scott Kelly’s genes did not return to normal after hisreturn to Earthtwo years ago. Source: ktla.com
WHY SIRI IS BEHIND THE GOOGLE ASSISTANT AND ALEXA
According to the report, after acquiring the original Siri app in 2010 for $200 million, Apple proceeded to quickly integrate the digital assistant into the iPhone 4S in 2011. There was so much potential for Siri, and Apple promised to bring voice controls to the masses just as it did multi-touch on the original iPhone. Source: mashable.com
FALSE MEMORIES, OR WHY WE’RE SO SURE OF THINGS WE’RE WRONG ABOUT
I’ve been interested in memory for as long as I can remember. In college, I studied neuropsychology in addition to philosophy, and interacted with patients suffering from memory deficits. One such deficit, known as confabulation, involved patients coming up with fantastic stories about absurd scenarios as if they were autobiographical memories. What intrigued me about this phenomenon is not what these patients got wrong — which was a lot — but rather what they got right. Despite being false, there was an air of plausibility to their confabulations.
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